This invention relates to integrated circuits, and more particularly to integrated circuits having at least one block that is dedicated to performing particular kinds of functions (such as digital signal processing (“DSP”) functions), and other blocks of a more general purpose nature (e.g., general purpose programmable logic blocks).
In integrated circuits of the type described above, the dedicated function block may be physically relatively large compared to one of the general purpose blocks. For example, ten general purpose circuit modules may form a so-called logic array block (“LAB”), and four rows of LABs may be interrupted by one dedicated function block. A dedicated function block may output 72 data signals in parallel, and assuming that each general purpose circuit module can further process two of these signals, then the 40 general purpose circuit modules that are adjacent to the dedicated function block in the four LAB rows that are interrupted by that block have enough capacity to further process all of the output signals of the dedicated block. However, this can necessitate extensive use not only of so-called horizontal interconnection conductor resources between the dedicated and general purpose blocks, but also use of so-called vertical interconnection conductors disposed in that same general area. The vertical conductors may need to be used to shift some of the dedicated block outputs from where they come out of that block adjacent one of the LAB rows to adjacency with another LAB row that they need to enter for further processing. Having to route some dedicated block outputs through vertical interconnection conductors can slow down this transfer of information from the dedicated block to the general purpose blocks. It would be desirable to reduce or eliminate such signal propagation delay.